Let’s Play Fluxus! with Ukrainian women’s community in Kaunas
Artists: Katarzyna Wasowska and Rasma Noreikytė
In 2024, as part of the Magic Carpets project, Kaunas Biennial was happy to collaborate with Kaunas Artists House for the Fluxus Festival. Held annually in Kaunas since 2017, the festival attracts thousands of people for a communal experience in the city center. Dressed in creative DIY costumes, they come together at night to climb a hill in celebration of the Fluxus art movement and its founder, George Mačiūnas, who was born in Kaunas. The festival also includes a wide cultural program of exhibitions, movie screenings and discussions. The collaboration started after recognizing the strong compatibility between Fluxus-inspired ideas and the values of the Magic Carpets project. According to the festival’s organisers, Fluxus is described as a desire for constant movement, elevation and change: from center to non-center, from the everyday to unexpectedness. DIY, stepping out of one’s comfort zone and playing games in everyday life are just a few of many Fluxus values that are also relevant to the Magic Carpets platform, which aims to strengthen the community involvement in arts.
It felt important to continue the friendship with the Ukrainian community in Kaunas this year, following two years of collaboration with Ukrainian children and women who have been living in Kaunas since the start of the large-scale invasion in their country. In 2024, the community was reached through the non-governmental charity and support foundation Frida, which works to promote and implement genuine gender equality in Lithuania while fighting discrimination and violence against women. This organisation hosts gatherings of the Ukrainian women’s community in a space located near the Kaunas Town Hall.
Collaborating with such a sensitive community and having a cheerful topic for a project was a challenge that we wanted to take on this year. We understood that it required special attention and the involvement of the right people to make sure everything was carried out with gentle care. Two artists were invited to participate in the Magic Carpets residency program. One of them was Rasma Noreikytė, a textile artist based in Kaunas, Lithuania, who works with mediums such as weaving, painting, photography and video, allowing her inner voice to guide her through the creative process and in her private life. The other one was Katarzyna Wasowska, a photographer and anthropologist from Poznań, Poland, who focuses on issues related to migration, identity, and nature and explores the influence of gardening and harvesting on community practices.
Workshops with community
Although the artistic mediums of these artists are different, they share sensitivity and empathy towards people. As both artists were invited to co-create with the same community, it was clear that the collaborative approach will be used in the whole process of the residency. Ukrainian women were invited to gather in the premises of the Frida center and meet the artists for the whole month twice a week. The first meeting with the community was intense on an emotional level but light in terms of activities. With the help of a translator, it was possible to make the multilingual group of people (who spoke Lithuanian, Ukrainian, English and Russian) feel more comfortable with each other. The gathering started with games that helped everyone to get acquainted with one another and with the project’s idea. Subsequent meetings went into the specificities of each artist’s idea for the project. Although the ideas and approaches were different, both artists participated in each other’s workshops, helping and complementing one another.
Katarzyna Wasowska wished to continue the explorations of her master thesis Cultivating soil, memory, and relations in an urban intercultural garden and implement her academic research in a physical place during the Magic Carpets residency. She investigated how the action of planting influences the experiences of refuge or migration. Ukrainian women living in Kaunas were invited to cultivate a memory-emotional gardens while communicating the stories of home, war and soil. The women selected the plants themselves: tomatoes, roses, potatoes, orchids, marigolds, sunflowers, eggplants and even a watermelon. Some plants were chosen because of their taste, some reminded them of the homeland, while others told a specific story about a person or an experience back home, thus preserving the relationship with the past and identity. According to Katarzyna, plants, just like humans, can go through quite a migratory experience, as they are carried by birds, wind and even people, who transport the seeds hidden in their pockets when fleeing their land to distant countries. Plants can adapt to foreign landscapes and bring a new and unique quality to the places where they take root. They manifest an incredible power of resistance: against the occupiers, against starvation, against drought. The garden provides a space for exploration and experience through senses, cognition, and action.
Rasma Noreikytė started the residency from thinking how to inspire people to unite and open up in one space. Rasma wanted people to feel comfortable, as if they were at home. She also tried to put herself in the shoes of the community members by analyzing past situations in her life when she felt shy and lonely, living in a foreign country, wanting to belong. She realized what brings people closer or helps to initiate dialogue — food! For the Magic Carpets project, Rasma invited people to share their precious family recipes, cook them at home, bring the food to the meetings and taste it together with the group. There are many different stories and memories hidden behind the recipes. This is how the idea was born — recipes that mean something to someone, remind them of something, or hold some kind of significance. While tasting the meals made from the recipes, women were also invited to embroider the cheerful toasts on the white linen tablecloth sitting around the table, as a symbol of togetherness.
Final event, residency results
The final results of the residencies were celebrated as part of the Fluxus festival in two parts. Starting the Intro program of the Fluxus festival, the Kaunas Biennial and Magic Carpets opened an exhibition which showcased all the artworks created during the residencies this year in Kaunas. Rasma Noreikytė published a recipe book titled “What Does the Recipe Evoke?”, which included the favorite family and friends’ recipes together with the community members’ stories about them. The book contains recipes without any selection, rejection or judgment. They all have their own significance and connection to memories. Also, visitors of the exhibition witnessed the installation of a long table covered with white linen tablecloth embroidered by Ukrainian community members. Viewers were invited to continue the process and write their own toasts on the cloth. After the exhibition was closed, the cloth was full of wishes, greetings, dreams and toasts written by people of various nationalities. The tablecloth as well as the recipe books were handed over to the community of Ukrainian women who continue gathering and enjoying food together.
Katarzyna Wasowska created two little community gardens together with the community. One of them is next to the premises of the Frida foundation, in one of the cozy courtyards of Kaunas Old Town. This garden represents the landscape of Ukraine and it is full of plants chosen and planted by the community members. It is both a space of social life and a carrier of history — whether from a political, economic or aesthetic perspective. Another garden was created as an art installation inside a glass greenhouse standing in the courtyard of the Kaunas Artists House. This garden brings together the stories of three women from Ukraine who have been living in Kaunas since 2022, when the large-scale invasion started in their country — Kataryna from Mariupol and Diana and Iryna from Kherson. All the stories are connected to plants, and all the plants in the greenhouse are connected to the women’s stories, which are written on the wooden labels next to each plant. Gardens give people hope for the future — the sort of hope one feels after the dead of winter, when spring arrives and life begins anew. This feeling was brought to the greenhouse visitors both inside and outside the space of the exhibition as the installation created by Katarzyna kept growing.
After the exhibition was opened, the Fluxus festival and the Magic Carpets residencies culminated at the same time, on a warm Saturday night in September, in the form of a carnival, when people climbed up the hill of Parodos street in Kaunas. The city’s dwellers and guests were preparing for the event all evening, as more than 10 open workshops were organized by various community members of Kaunas, who initiated the joint making of DIY costumes as a way to creatively express individual as well as communal identity. The Ukrainian women’s community together with Rasma and Katarzyna were a part of the festival too. The women’s idea was to become a human garden of flowers and walk up the hill with huge paper flowers on their heads. These costumes were a beautiful and powerful combination of fragility and strength, of cheerfulness and thoughtfulness. The symbolic act of climbing up the hill together with other kind people summarized the whole process of the residencies and time spent together while seeking to achieve a positive impact on individuals.
Curator of the project: Brigita Bareikytė
Community facilitator: Austėja Bliumkytė – Padgurskienė
Partners: FLUXUS festival, Kaunas Artist House, NGO Family Center “Let’s be together” (VšĮ “Būkime kartu“), Non-governmental charity and support foundation “Frida”, Openart, Wrocławski Instytut Kultury, Kauno Kolegija Higher Education Institution.
Big thank you to all who contributed to the realization of this project: bakery “Bundu”, “Pranciškaus malūnas“, Kaunas yoga studio, Vytautas Magnus University, restaurant “Skliautas“, UPS, “Tiesiog” studio, Deimantas Mackevičius, Jomantas Padgurskas, Arūnas Periokas, Gintarė Žaltauskaitė, Vaida Barzdaitė, Marius Paplauskas, Nataliia Tataurova, Martynas Gedvila, Paulina Brelinska-Garzska, Sofia Gustafsson, Diana Povilaitus, Kateryna Polupanova, Birutė Zeigienė and all the wonderful community members!
The project is partly funded by European Union and Lithuanian Culture Institute.
Curatorial text by Brigita Bareikytė